Sword of the Gods: Agents of Ki (Sword of the Gods Saga) (61 page)

Abaddon leaned forward so he stood with the Electrophori nose-to-nose.

"Lieutenant Valac!" he barked, not breaking eye contact with the eel.

"Yes, Sir?" Valac hurried to stand next to them.

"Colonel Ekk isn't used to getting her hands dirty." Abaddon gave the woman a cruel grin. "Would you do me a favor and babysit her? Just in case a boogeyman jumps out of the shadows and scares her?"

Colonel Ekk's speckled brown skin turned mahogany with mortification.

"Well … I'll…I'll…" Ekk stammered.

Abaddon leaned forward so that he spoke inches from her face.

"You will do as I tell you to do,
Colonel.
" Abaddon accentuated her rank, or lack thereof. "Unless you would like to be reassigned to the Tokoloshe front? We're right on the border here, you know?"

"I have processed information from the cannibals before," Colonel Ekk said stiffly.

Abaddon flared his wings. "We have desperate little intel coming out of that kingdom, largely because the cannibals
eat
whichever of our operatives they catch. If this mission is beneath you, perhaps I could reassign you to do some hands-on intelligence gathering?"

Colonel Ekk's skin turned an interesting shade of olive green.

"No thank you, Sir," Ekk said, evenly to her credit. Her interrogation training had taught her to hide her feelings, but not so well that Abaddon didn't pick up on the nervous fizzle of static electricity which crackled down her tail like a balloon which had just been untied to let out all the air.

"Good," Abaddon said. He glanced at Valac. "You. Babysit her. Make sure the lizards didn't leave anyone in the shadows to ambush our science team."

Colonel Ekk gave him a crisp salute, and then moved over to oversee the readiness of her investigatory team. Although the secret service technically served under him now, they'd always had far too much autonomy. It was something he intended to rectify as soon as the chaos of Lucifer's rebellion settled down.

Lieutenant Valac waited until the woman left to contradict him.

"Sir? You know it's my duty to watch out for
you
. Not some quasi-civilian contractor."

"You'll do as I order," Abaddon grumbled, but not angrily. Protecting him was his Weapons Officer's job.

"Always, Sir," Lieutenant Valac said. The man loosened his wings out of the crisp dress-wings formation. "It's just that … sir? With Lucifer missing, if anything were to happen to
you…
"

Abaddon curled one wing forward to brush against his thigh, deep in thought. Yes. The same thought had crossed his mind. Without Lucifer here to keep Parliament in line, the fools were subject to the whims of the mob. It was only a matter of time before the idiots grew tired of waging war and went back to the Emperor, prayer-caps in hand, begging their god for redemption rather than getting off their asses to defend their
own
homeworlds. Abaddon patted the hilt of his pulse rifle.

"You take care of the spook," Abaddon said. "I'm just here to see Shemijaza's legendary genetics laboratory with my own eyes."

Abaddon thought back to the glory days when Lucifer had not yet been conceived and Shemijaza had played the two emperor-gods against one another to carve out a place for his growing Third Empire. Back then, the Eternal Emperor had still possessed a pair of
magairlí
the size of a Centauri stallion.

"Hashem had every spy in his arsenal searching for this place," Abaddon said. "We'd always assumed it had been blown up with Tyre."

Lieutenant Valac pulled up one of the images the initial landing party uploaded as live feed.

"It appears he froze most of what he spliced together," Valac said, "instead of warehousing them where he could study them the way that the Eternal Emperor does."

"It makes sense to keep a cryo-facility on an ice world," Abaddon said. "Shemijaza was always, if anything, terrifyingly pragmatic."

Valac's wings shook with violent emotion.

"Does this make sense?!" He shoved the flat screen into Abaddon's face.

Abaddon stared at the image of a frozen adolescent lizard, her hands pressed against the glass as though she'd been pleading to be let out moments before she'd been involuntarily frozen. How in Hades had Shemijaza gotten his hands on a Sata'anic female? Shay'tan kept all females sequestered to the Hades cluster as an insurance policy against desertion. The lizards had a shorter maturity period than the slow-growing hybrids, only seven years from hatchling to adult. This specimen appeared to have been perhaps five years old at the time she'd been frozen, the emotional equivalent of an eleven-year-old.

"Why? Why would Shemijaza do such a thing?" Abaddon caressed the image on the flat screen.

"According to Third Empire propaganda, Shemijaza welcomed all species into his empire, even the Sata'anic lizards."

The pilot's voice came over the intercom and announced they were coming in for a landing. The crewmen hurried back into their seats. Landing was rarely as rough as breaching the outer atmosphere, but on an unknown planet it was always prudent to buckle in.

The shuttle lurched as the pilot fired the VTOL engines. Abaddon instinctively reached over to restrain his wife from jerking forward and ended up restraining his Weapons Officer instead. Lieutenant Valac gave him a knowing grin. Abaddon pulled back his hand. Goddess how he missed Sarvenaz!

The shuttle bumped down lightly on the snowpack. Valac unclipped his seatbelt and immediately assumed command of his part of the mission, securing the landing party and escorting the Sci-Ops crew into the base. One by one the men slipped on their breathers, tiny oxygen masks to compensate for the reduced levels of breathable air. Abaddon slipped on his as well, even though the oxygen levels were merely deficient enough to cause fatigue.

"Alright men!" Valac shouted. "You know the drill! Fan out. Make sure there are no surprises hiding in the closet so our intel guys can get to work without worrying about a pulse rifle to the back!"

The rear gangplank of the shuttle moved down, letting in a frigid blast of air. The away team pulled up their hoods and clipped their goggles over their eyes. Although a team had already secured the base, with sub- zero temperatures and perpetual whiteout conditions, there was no guarantee that some of the lizards hadn't regrouped just out of sight. They moved out of the shuttle in two well-formed lines, one pair rushing out in front of the other to kneel, scan the perimeter with their pulse rifles, and then signal the next team to do the same.

Abaddon squelched his urge to move out with them. As Supreme Commander-General and the only hybrid who had a clue as to what Lucifer's rebellion had really been about, it was up to him to stay alive long enough to locate Sarvenaz's homeworld. He waited until Valac gave the signal before stepping down the ramp into the artic landscape.

Damantia! It was freezing! He wrapped his wings around his torso to cut the wind. It blew right through his parka and his feathers. A sensation akin to an icepick being driven into his knee caused him to limp. Excrementia! When had he gotten old? He unfurled his wings and catapulted himself away from the effects of gravity. His wings instantly turned numb, but he flew to the entrance to the base like an Angelic should, not walked like a land animal.

"General?" Lieutenant Valac said with a straight face.

Abaddon ruffled his feathers and shook out the ice particles which had instantly imbedded themselves into his wings.

"Lieutenant," Abaddon replied with an emotionless expression.

He knew he'd regret his juvenile impulse to fly when his wings punished him by shooting pins and needles down his back when the blood flowed back into the limbs, but right now he didn't care. He had a younger wife to keep up with and he'd be damned if he'd stay ship-bound like some geriatric old fool!

The Leonid Brigadier-General who'd first obtained intelligence from the Free Marid about this asset stepped forward, a good cubit taller than Abaddon, with a thick, reddish-brown mane and golden pelt typical of the half-humanoid/half lion hybrids. Leonids were the closest to extinction of all the hybrids, and therefore the most eager to help.

"Supreme Commander-General Abaddon," Rahotep gave a crisp salute. "Right this way, Sir. We haven't had a chance to explore the entire base, but we thought you'd want to see this right away."

Abaddon followed the man through a series of tunnels which burrowed deep into the ice. They crossed a rickety rope bridge built across part of the glacier which had fractured, a recent addition, Sata'anic in design. His breath steamed out in front of his face as they walked through tunnels which had seen little action in the 200 years since Shemijaza had died. The men grew silent the further they descended into the crypt, the only sound being the ice groaning like an old woman in pain.

"Were you able to capture any of the lizards?" Abaddon whispered even though there was nobody here to hear them. "I'd love to find out how long Shay'tan had this base in his claws."

"No, Sir," Rahotep said. "The minute my men pulled over the base, the lizards bugged out and ran. They barely even gave us a fight, just hopped into their shuttles took off."

The Leonid Brigadier-General had an eager look about him, the same eager look Abaddon suspected he wore. Two ship's commanders, neither able to resist the temptation of exploring Shemijaza's mythological genetics laboratory. They had plenty of firepower in orbit at the moment, but then again, so had Shay'tan, and look where it had gotten him?

Abaddon signaled Rahotep to fall into step beside him.

"As soon as you're debriefed, hightail it back to the
Emperor's Vengeance
and make sure Shay'tan doesn't sneak up on us while I'm here instead of on my ship. Lieutenant-Captain Shzzkt is a good man, but he's untested leading a carrier brigade if Shay'tan decides to jump out of hyperspace and surprise us the same way that we just surprised him.

Rahotep's whiskers drooped, but the Brigadier-General took it in stride.

"Of course," Rahotep said. "Right this way, Sir."

The crewmen led them to a large steel door, brand spanking new and Sata'anic in origin, but the door frame which surrounded it was rusted and full of pock-marks. It was more evidence that Shay'tan had developed an interest in this planet only recently. Two of Rahotep's men stood stationed on either side of the door, but Abaddon forced the eager scientists to wait while he sent in Lieutenant Valac's men. He stared at the brand-new door, a door designed to be slammed shut and hold off an invasion. Why hadn't the lizards retreated inside the chamber?

Valac's eager voice echoed from inside the ice chamber. "Shay'tan's scaly tail!"

Abaddon signaled the men to follow him inside.

They stepped into a cavern so enormous he could swear the Jehoshaphat would fit comfortably inside of it. He'd seen images on his flat screen, but they'd failed to capture the scale of Shemijaza's prize research project. This facility was even larger than the laboratory that Hashem had built onto the Eternal Palace. Row upon row of cryo-chamber stretched across the vast ice cave to a laboratory set up at the very end. They walked together while Valac's away team rifled through each row, searching for an enemy huddled behind the machines.

Abaddon stepped up to one of the cryo-chambers and rubbed on the glass which had frosted over from the bitter cold. A hideous, distorted face stared out at him, part-animal and part-humanoid, its mouth twisted up into an eternal scream. Abaddon stepped back, his feathers rustling with revulsion. So. The rumors were true? Shemijaza had been experimenting with creating other types of hybrids.

"Shemijaza chose this world," Colonel Ekk said softly from behind him, "because with the frigid temperatures, he'd need very little power to maintain the cryo-chambers. I can see why neither emperor ever picked up on the energy signature."

Abaddon met the Electrophori agent's gaze. Her expression was no longer the sanctimonious one she'd sported earlier. He gestured for her to explore whatever goodies Shemijaza had left behind.

They fanned out like eager schoolchildren, chattering about the genetic modifications of the frozen inhabitants. Each chamber contained a separate creature which had been experimented upon and then frozen, though for what reason Abaddon could not say. Some creatures he recognized, but others? A few bore no resemblance to any life form he knew. He came to a spot where a cryo-chamber had been removed.

"There seem to be a lot of them missing," Rahotep said. "Recent, from the look of it. The video footage my Free Marid contact showed me was of the lizards removing three such chambers."

Rahotep pointed to the far end of the cavern where a small, square pod rose above the icy floor. "That's the main laboratory. At least in there the lizards rigged up some heat."

"Any records?" Abaddon asked. "I'd sure love to figure out just what Shemijaza was up to."

"The lizards grabbed their own computers and smashed the older equipment, the ones dating back to Shemijaza," Rahotep said. "I've already got my two best computer technicians interfacing with a Darda'ail hive-mind to see if there's anything we can salvage."

The thought crossed Abaddon's mind that perhaps the Emperor would be the best person to accomplish that task. Hashem was, after all, the galaxy's leading geneticist, second only, it was said, to She-who-is herself. Should he tell the Emperor he'd finally found his long-lost prize?